Team Member Spotlight – Noel John, VP of Client Engagement and Delivery
October 30, 2023
Blanc Labs’ recently appointed Noel John as VP of Client Engagement and Delivery. We are thrilled that Noel has joined the team and brings with him a strong background in client engagement leadership.
Noel joins Blanc Labs from a fortune 500 publicly traded global technology and consulting company, where he spent close to 20 years on various leadership roles including leading a specialized QEA practice for Canadian BFSI customers. As a trusted partner for clients, he aids them in achieving their business objectives. His approach is rooted in the belief that true transformation requires active listening and a partnering approach through all phases of the journey.
Noel John
VP Client Engagement & Delivery, Blanc Labs
My focus is on building a One-Team culture in the customer-partner ecosystem, encouraging cross-functional cooperation, building high performance teams, and growth strategies that lead to driving successful outcomes.
5 Questions with Noel John
Get to know our amazing team members.
Q: Noel, you have an extensive background in client engagement and delivery, what do you think are the biggest drivers of success?
I have found that bringing a client centric approach to everything you do has proven to be a tried and trusted driver for success. You need to understand the client’s business, their future plans and the industry trends. You need to be their trusted partner to drive the required change.
Q: Technology is always evolving, and it seems like we are in a period of rapid acceleration. What technology trends are you watching closely and/or building capability to serve clients?
Artificial Intelligence has become de-facto topic in a huge number of client conversations. AI is not just a technological advancement but it’s poised to transform the whole business i.e it’s transforming how clients conduct their business.
We are still in the very early stages of this evolution but we now have all the ingredients like data, compute power, storage etc. Human creativity combined with the AI capabilities will unleash enormous opportunities for consumers and businesses.
These are some of the most exciting spaces to be working with clients because enabling this transformative technology will require a highly collaborative approach between business and technology teams, as well as partner support.
Q: What attracted you to Blanc Labs? Why did you decide to join this organization at this point in your career?
While I spent most of my career so far with large fortune 500 company, I was hungry to have new experiences, learn new skills and contribute along the way.
Blanc Labs provided this opportunity to run your portfolio like a start-up. I am looking forward to making a meaningful impact leveraging Blanc Labs’ entrepreneurial and innovative culture.
Q: Noel, thanks for the thoughtful responses. We are super excited to have you join the team and work with you. Last question, tell us something about yourself that folks in your professional network might not know about you.
I love to be outdoors during all four seasons, hiking in summer and skiing in winter.
I also own a motorcycle and love to take weekend trips to cruise the backroads of Ontario. This time of year is particularly special as you get to see the amazing fall colors on the trees. Safe motoring and see you on the road!
Technology | Digital Transformation | IT Management
Digital Transformation Vs. IT Modernization: What’s the Difference?
July 11, 2023
In today’s dynamic business landscape, organizations face numerous challenges such as economic volatility, supply chain complexities, evolving work styles, competing for talent, fickle consumer trends, market commoditization, sustainability concerns, and more. As stated in Forrester Research’s 2021 report, “In the 2020s, the one constant will be disruption.” CIOs play a crucial role in navigating these challenges and driving business transformation. The ability to embrace disruption will set leaders apart from laggards in this ever-changing landscape.
In this context, it is important for technology executives to make the choice between modernizing legacy processes or instituting a complete transformation of their systems. Yet, many organizations struggle to understand the difference.
In this article, we explore both digital transformation and modernization and why transformation is mission-critical for modern businesses.
Digital Transformation Vs. IT Modernization
Digital transformation has a broader scope and touches almost every facet of a business. IT modernization’s scope is limited to upgrading existing systems.
Don’t get us wrong. Modernizing your tech stack is just as critical to your business as transformation. The 2023 CEO Priorities survey shows that 51% of CEOs think low digital maturity/technical capabilities are barriers to creating business value with AI. As companies try to achieve digital maturity, they’ll go through multiple IT modernization iterations.
Let’s dig into the differences between digital transformation and IT modernization.
Digital Transformation in Practice
A digital transformation is meant to change or evolve some of the DNA of an organization such that a company is better equipped to compete in a constantly evolving environment where customer expectations are changing at breakneck speed. Technology can and should play a central role in a digital transformation but technology alone will not equip a company to operate effectively in this “new normal”, this requires a careful choreography of people, processes, and technology.
In addition to being better equipped to meet evolving customer needs and expectations, digital transformation can be your doorway to scaling your business by entering new markets, eliminating or minimizing process inefficiencies, and becoming more agile.
Domino’s is an excellent example of how digital transformation can change your company’s growth trajectory. Back in the day, the pizza chain was a brick-and-mortar restaurant that promised to deliver pizzas in under 30 minutes.
Competitors started offering a similar service. So Patrick Doyle, the CEO of Domino’s in 2011, decided to create an app that allowed customers to order pizza within seconds. Currently, Domino’s is testing delivery via autonomous vehicles to stay ahead of delivery services like DoorDash and Uber Eats.
Essentially, digital transformation involves a fundamental shift in various business aspects, like internal processes and your business model. The goal is to achieve sustained growth and become a more competitive business.
Modernization in Practice
Modernization is often confused with digital transformation, but they are not the same. Modernization focuses on building on top of existing systems. For example, you could implement cloud computing and AI without changing legacy processes.
Suppose you’re a bank that is looking to improve its mortgage origination process. You currently require staff to enter customer details manually. Over the next quarter, you want to implement an automated loan origination system that eliminates almost all the mundane tasks in the origination process.
For this, you’ll use technologies like AI, natural language processing (NLP), optical character recognition (OCR), and robotic process automation (RPA) through third-party integration or by building a new solution. These technologies will enable you to automate tasks like document processing and customer onboarding.
These technologies can help you re-engineer the origination process to make it more efficient—without disturbing your underlying mortgage process or the business model.
Why Digital Transformation Matters
Digital transformation is right for you if you’re in a rapidly evolving market and want to stay ahead of the competition.
Since digital transformation involves a more comprehensive change in your business’s model and operational processes, it can be resource and time-intensive, especially in the absence of first-hand experience on the multi-faceted nature of transforming an organization. Let’s go back to our mortgage example to understand the difference between transformation and modernization. Consider if the mortgage lender wanted to move from being a traditional, broker-based lender to a digital direct lender and the relative time, cost and complexity required to stand up a whole new business model.
IT modernization is relatively less resource and time-intensive. Modernization is an excellent place to start if you’re struggling to meet customer expectations or efficiency targets because of outdated technology.
Revamping your technological systems will help you reduce costs, operate more efficiently, and scale your business.
Digital transformation matters to two types of businesses:
Businesses that want to stay ahead of the curve by implementing the latest technologies in a fast-evolving market.
Businesses that need to survive in a market where other businesses failed to implement new technologies on time.
Digital transformation isn’t easy for either of these businesses to implement without an experienced team—only about 30% of companies navigate digital transformation successfully.
However, once you’ve successfully completed digital transformation, your business stands to benefit on multiple fronts.
The pandemic caused the most recent surge in digital transformation. Businesses were forced to adapt to an environment where employees prefer remote or hybrid work models, but they benefited greatly from the changes that followed.
That’s exactly why more businesses are excited about digital transformation. In fact, according to the World Economic Forum, the combined value of digital transformation to society and industry will exceed $100 trillion by 2025.
Here are some benefits of digital transformation that highlight why it can be a game changer for your business this year:
Improves Customer Experience
Customer expectations have risen significantly over the past decade. They prefer businesses that offer a great experience in all customer-facing aspects.
Enable Data-Driven Decision Making
Data analytics is one of the most critical capabilities you gain from digital transformation. With modern tech, it is typically much easier to securely access and manipulate data that can be used to unlock valuable insights about customers, competitors, and internal processes.
Better Resource Management
Digitally-powered businesses use hundreds of apps and store data in multiple places. The lack of interoperability and data silos can make business hard. Digital transformation involves integrating these digital tools, allowing you to consolidate dispersed data sets and apps.
Improves Team Collaboration
Adding the right digital collaboration tools to your toolkit can be critical to building a collaborative environment in the workplace. They allow teams to collaborate outside the office space or country. If your team is spread across time zones, you can use async communication tools for better collaboration.
Increases Scalability
Digital transformation gives you the flexibility to grow faster. It can help reduce time to market and make product or service improvements faster. You can also serve clients in a larger geographic area and communicate with your clientele more effectively.
What Does it Take to Create Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation needs more than just technical expertise. It’s a massive undertaking where multiple factors contribute to your success.
Here are things to focus on when transforming your business digitally:
Digital First Culture
Transforming your business requires agility and an attitude to pursue the latest technologies proactively. Building a digital-first culture, where employees proactively look for opportunities to use digital solutions to help the business achieve its goals, is critical to successfully transforming your business.
Culture is a critical part of Gartner’s ContinuousNEXT approach to digital transformation. The Gartner experts who coined the term cite culture as a major barrier — 46% of CIOs identify culture as the most significant barrier to digital transformation.
A report by MIT and Capgemini explains that focusing on the following seven cultural attributes can be vital to building a digital-first culture:
Innovation: The prevalence of behaviors that support taking risks, thinking disruptively, and exploring new ideas.
Digital-first mindset: A mindset where everyone, by default, thinks of digital solutions first.
Customer-centricity: The use of digital tools to improve customer experience, expand the customer base, and co-create new products.
Open culture: The extent of partnership with third parties, including vendors and customers.
Agility and flexibility: Decision-making speed, dynamism, and your company’s ability to adapt to evolving market demands and technologies.
Data-driven decision-making: The use of data to make better decisions.
Collaboration: The strategic creation of teams to make the best use of the company’s human resources.
Change Management
Often, the most overlooked aspect of a digital transformation is the amount of change management and capability development required to enable team members to excel in their new or evolved roles. One takeaway that we’ve learned from our experience is the need to have a strong leadership commitment and a high level of conviction and alignment across the senior leadership team on the transformation objectives, priorities, and plan to undertake the transformation effort at an organization. .
When communicating a change, remember that the benefits of change may be evident to you. Yet, your team might see change as a signal to step out of a workflow they’re comfortable with and learn new skills.
Resistance will snowball when one employee who feels that way communicates with colleagues. Change management can help prevent or at least minimize this resistance to change.
Here are three critical elements of managing change:
Plan before you start: Change management should start before digital transformation. Risk analysis and assessing the organization’s readiness are great ways to lay the foundation for your change management strategy. They involve identifying organizational attributes like culture and characteristics of change.
Change management: This is where you go from planning to execution. You keep communicating your digital transformation plans, address concerns regarding the plan, and train employees.
Feedback: Change management doesn’t end after executing your change management strategy. Seek feedback from employees about the change. If you see reluctance, take corrective actions to ensure resistance doesn’t snowball.
Data-Driven Organization
Digital transformation is highly data-driven. Managing data — storing and processing data and ensuring data integrity — are one of the first things you’ll need to work on when you start the digital transformation process.
Data provides a unique insight into your operations. Once you’ve achieved a higher level of operational transparency and gained a deeper understanding of core business processes using data, you’ll be able to identify barriers to digital transformation. Data will also enable you to improve and optimize your transformation strategy continuously.
Companies like Airbnb and Amazon hold massive volumes of data. These companies are great examples of data-driven organizations. This data allows them to personalize customer experiences and stay one step ahead of the competition.
Emphasis on Quality
When you’re adamant about delivering quality, you’ll need to ask yourself — is the business prepared to ensure a high level of quality during the digital transformation journey?
Going all in at once is a bad idea. Digital transformation requires an incremental approach where you plan, test, and validate ideas every step of the way. This will allow you to stay prepared for potential pitfalls and optimize your strategy as you go. You’ll avoid complete disasters, which can result in loss of money, trust, and reputation.
Taking an incremental approach makes your digital transformation journey smoother and ensures you maintain high quality throughout the transformation process.
Begin Your Digital Transformation Journey
Digital transformation can be challenging to navigate without an experienced partner.
At Blanc Labs, we understand each organization has unique needs. We offer advisory and consulting services to gain a complete understanding of your most pressing challenges and help you start your digital transformation journey.
Book a discovery call with us today to learn more.
Healthcare Interoperability: Challenges and Benefits
Healthcare | FHIR | Interoperability | IT Management
Healthcare Interoperability: Challenges and Benefits
May 26, 2023
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 provided hospitals and health professionals incentives to use electronic health record technology. Healthcare organizations quickly moved healthcare records to digital applications, providing an opportunity to use this data cohesively through healthcare interoperability.
ARRA has been the driving force behind the digitization of healthcare records in the recent past. The problem? Software vendors developed various applications for the healthcare industry. The result was data silos stored in disparate systems.
Healthcare interoperability is a step towards developing a digital ecosystem for the healthcare industry, where data can be exchanged and accessed securely without boundaries.
What is Healthcare Interoperability?
Interoperability removes the barriers in information exchange introduced by differences in technology, architecture, and vendors.
Seamless access to healthcare data is critical. The inability to access healthcare records during an emergency can result in adverse outcomes.
Keeping health data secure is just as important as the ability to share it. That’s why healthcare interoperability requires a careful approach. The combined use of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and information standards like FHIR and HL7 can help healthcare companies make the best use of electronic records while ensuring data integrity.
Healthcare interoperability allows clinicians to provide better care and coordinate with other clinicians. It provides clinicians and other healthcare providers with a standardized way to collect and report public health data.
Collectively, these factors can improve patient outcomes and safety, minimize the risk of error, and increase the efficiency of internal processes.
Foundational interoperability (or simple transport) is the most basic type of interoperability. A system transfers data to another system without interpreting or changing its format.
For example, you download a patient’s public health record and manually enter those details into your proprietary software.
Structural Interoperability
Structural interoperability (or structured transport) involves interpretation. Systems exchange data and, when needed, convert it to a standardized format for interpretation.
The information uses a standard syntax and organization, so it’s easier for the receiving system to detect and interpret specific fields.
FHIR and HL7 provide structural interoperability, allowing you to move information across systems seamlessly.
Semantic Interoperability
Exchanging and interpreting data with entirely different data structures requires semantic interoperability (or semantic transport).
Suppose you receive a scanned image of a patient’s medical report. The information in this image must be converted into text fields before it can be imported into your system.
Extracting the information from one system, structuring it so that another system understands the extracted information, and automatically filling out the right data in the right fields requires artificial intelligence (AI).
A combination of technologies like optical character recognition (OCR), robotic process automation (RPA), and AI can help achieve full semantic interoperability like so:
OCR extracts the information from the image: The information in the patient’s report like their name and blood group is extracted.
AI-based technologies like NLP and machine learning (ML) help interpret the extracted information: The information may not always be in a standard format. For example, the numbers in your blood report may be written as 10^9 or 109. NLP will help the system understand that both of these mean the same thing.
RPA populates the relevant data in the recipient system: Once the system interprets this information, RPA automatically adds this information to the recipient system.
Organizational Interoperability
Organizational interoperability is the highest level of interoperability.
It facilitates sharing and interpreting healthcare data securely, seamlessly, and in a timely fashion between organizations, entities, and individuals, with governance, policy, social, legal, and organizational considerations factored in.
Organizational interoperability is the goal. But most healthcare companies are still working on achieving foundational and structural interoperability.
Once organizations have achieved lower levels of interoperability, they’ll have a strong foundation for achieving organizational interoperability and other ways to improve health data exchange.
Navigating the journey from foundational to organizational interoperability is fraught with challenges, but these can be overcome with careful planning and strategizing. Read more here.
What is FHIR?
Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) is a healthcare data standards framework developed by HL7 (Health Level 7). The FHIR provides a standard framework to make transferring healthcare data between systems easier.
FHIR consists of resources like health data formats and elements (such as conditions and medications) that you can exchange easily. It also provides standardization for APIs.
Modern healthcare benefits from FHIR in multiple ways. It facilitates exchanging information with legacy applications, but that’s not the only reason to use FHIR.
The Blue Button 2.0 API, which allows accessing healthcare information, is based on FHIR. The FHIR standards framework is a key component of the United States’ national interoperability roadmap.
If your healthcare business receives payments for Medicare or Medicaid, using FHIR for interoperability is critical.
Data from an Engineer Group survey commissioned by Change Healthcare suggests that only 24% of healthcare companies were using FHIR APIs at scale in 2021. However, the research suggests widespread adoption by 2024.
As more healthcare providers start using FHIR APIs, they’ll be able to use and provide patients with a richer set of functionalities.
4 Challenges with Healthcare Information Exchange
The current low rate of interoperability is a result of the challenges associated with healthcare information exchange. Below are four of the most pressing challenges that stand in the way of healthcare organizations achieving interoperability.
Inconsistent Data
Healthcare organizations generate data from multiple, disparate sources. These sources typically store data in the database in various formats and data types that are incompatible with each other.
When systems exchange incompatible data types, the recipient system can’t interpret the information. For example, medical records may contain the patient’s medical history and treatment plan. The recipient system must interpret this information to be able to use it.
Electronic health records (EHR) need a secure mechanism to validate requests for patient information.
Many providers use systems that may or may not be compatible with EHR products, which can potentially result in a breach of regulations like HIPAA.
Once the ONC’s Cures Act Final Rule comes into force, healthcare providers will need to comply with its new training and certification requirements too.
Personal health information (PHI) breaches can be a recipe for losing reputation and heavy penalties.
Conflict of Interest
Not all businesses want to share patient data because you’ll often need to share information with a direct competitor.
For example, if you’re a hospital, you’ll understandably be reluctant to share patient data with urgent care clinics.
Regulations are the best solution to this challenge. The Cures Act has various information-blocking provisions that will compel healthcare providers to provide information when appropriate.
Cost of Hiring an Interoperability Specialist
Achieving interoperability is expensive because it requires specialists that dedicate their time to maintain interoperability.
Of course, this person needs the right qualifications and experience handling interoperability-related tasks.
If you make some rough calculations, you’ll see just how expensive hiring this specialist can be. The cost makes providers, especially smaller healthcare businesses, rethink the feasibility of interoperability.
The solution to this problem is simpler than the previous ones. Instead of hiring a person, you can invest in an automated interoperability system that takes care of most tasks.
An automation system costs significantly less than hiring a specialist in the long term.
5 Benefits of Healthcare Interoperability
The benefits of healthcare interoperability far outweigh the cost of addressing the challenges. Here are the five benefits healthcare interoperability offers.
Improves Patient Outcomes and Experience
Healthcare interoperability isn’t just a regulatory burden. It’s an asset you can build to improve patient outcomes and experience.
As life expectancy rises, interoperability will prepare you for value-based patient care. Real-time access to a patient’s medical history allows you to get a deeper insight into the patient’s condition and minimize medical errors.
Data access also reduces duplication of efforts. Since you’ll have the information about diagnosis, tests, and results, you can directly start working on developing a treatment plan or running other tests.
You’ll know about the patient’s allergies and health plan before starting treatment so that you can provide appropriate advice.
These factors collectively improve the patient’s experience and allow you to provide better care.
Reduces Cost of Care
Interoperability reduces the cost of care in multiple ways:
Streamlines care delivery: Better coordination among healthcare providers streamlines care delivery. You won’t have to repeat tests, and you’ll have the information about the previous diagnosis and treatment.
Minimizes errors: Interoperability reduces the cost of care by minimizing medical errors.
Increased productivity: Your administrative staff won’t have to reenter the same data over and over once you’ve achieved interoperability. Your team saves time on manual data entry when you use technologies like intelligent document processing (IDP) to convert physical documents into digital files.
Collectively, these factors can help reduce the cost of care by a good margin. You can transfer these savings to your patients to offer them more value at a lower cost.
Keeps Patient Data Secure
Patients trust that their data is safe with healthcare providers. Compromising this data’s integrity can result in a loss of reputation. Ensuring data integrity is also a compliance requirement.
Hundreds of electronic medical records are compromised daily. As many as 54,396 individuals were affected just by a single breach at the NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital on March 20, 2023.
Your systems need to be HIPAA-compliant. The best interoperability partners are experienced in creating compliant interoperability solutions, which is reassuring when implementing a complex technological solution with legal implications.
Contributes to Research
The data you collect during regular business, like diagnosing, testing, and treating patients can be an asset for public health researchers.
Interoperability allows researchers to request data from your systems for studies in various medical fronts like epidemiology and pathology.
This helps build a good reputation. You can add the fact that you share data with scientists to contribute to society and build goodwill for your healthcare business.
Minimizes Burnout
Digital transformation generally makes processes faster and easier. But the situation with EHR adoption is a little different.
The administrative load on physicians has increased significantly because of compliance requirements and disparate solutions used by clinicians.
That’s where interoperability helps. It allows you to automate mundane labor-intensive tasks like data entry.
With less time spent on time-consuming and repetitive tasks, your administrative staff won’t reel under the pressure of EHR compliance requirements. Addressing burnout also reduces the probability of human error.
Start Your Interoperability Journey with Blanc Labs
Achieving structural interoperability offers various benefits. Selecting a partner with extensive experience managing APIs is critical to reaping the full benefits of structural interoperability and frictionless implementation.
Blanc Labs are experts at building standards-based interoperability solutions that enable healthcare organizations to improve patient outcomes, enhance efficiency and achieve seamless integration within the health ecosystem.
Book a discovery session with Blanc Labs to learn how we can help your healthcare business achieve interoperability.
Navigating the Healthcare Interoperability Journey
Healthcare | Digital Transformation | Interoperability | IT Management
Navigating the Healthcare Interoperability Journey
May 18, 2023
The journey of navigating healthcare interoperability is a critical one, and an incredibly complex endeavor. Healthcare organizations must tackle big tasks like accessing exchange networks, mapping messages across systems, and integrating with multiple data sources while also operating within tight compliance rules. It can be especially daunting for executives tasked with ensuring successful implementation. If this describes you or someone on your team, don’t worry—there are ways to ensure success as you undertake the process of achieving healthcare interoperability.
In this article we explain what it means to embark on an interoperability journey and how best to implement it throughout an enterprise organization.
Stage 1: Strategy and Roadmap
Beginning the healthcare interoperability journey involves addressing key pain points, such as:
A lack of common standards and communication protocols between existing health systems like Electronic Medical Record (EMR), Laboratory Information Systems (LIS), etc.
Limited IT budgets and minimal underlying infrastructure
A shortage of interoperability-focused resources
To tackle these challenges, the first step is to create a well-defined strategy, followed by a comprehensive gap analysis and a dynamic roadmap aimed at ensuring regulatory compliance and achieving seamless integration of healthcare data. A crucial aspect of this journey is addressing the CMS (Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services) mandate that requires healthcare organizations to adopt and implement interoperability standards.
At this stage of the interoperability journey, organizations move from having disconnected data systems to making data organized and manageable. Applications of interoperability at this stage include patient-centered care.
The importance of securing curated and standardized health data
Securing curated and standardized data is crucial in ensuring that information is both organized and meaningful, particularly in the context of patient-centered care. By utilizing a data curation process, healthcare providers can effectively gather, annotate, and maintain relevant datasets that accurately represent patients’ medical histories, conditions, and preferences. This process often involves removing inconsistencies or inaccuracies, as well as integrating data from various sources into one unified platform. Standardizing this data in accordance with industry regulations or established protocols, such as the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) or Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine – Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT), enables seamless communication and the exchange of information.
Furthermore, the implementation of advanced security measures, including encryption and robust access controls, helps protect sensitive patient information from unauthorized access or potential breaches, adhering to privacy standards like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Altogether, the rigorous curation, standardization, and security of data serve as foundational elements in the journey to interoperability.
Stage 2: Validating Strategy
The journey towards interoperability maturity is a complex and ongoing process, requiring healthcare organizations to regularly validate their strategies and roadmaps, align budgets with evolving business needs and technological advancements, and comply with CMS mandates. Achieving interoperability maturity involves focusing on core aspects such as:
Enabling seamless communication and coordination between disparate systems
Instituting a robust data management plan with accurate data mapping
Leveraging cutting-edge API technologies to address diverse use cases efficiently
Organizations must stay ahead of the curve by continuously assessing and refining their interoperability efforts with industry best practices and regulatory requirements as benchmarks. This iterative approach ensures that organizations can consistently drive improvements in care delivery, patient satisfaction, and long-term healthcare outcomes.
By this stage in the interoperability journey, companies graduate from simply having organized data systems to making them data analytics ready. This enables organizations to track patients over a longer period and participate in integrated healthcare.
Stage 3: Developing and end-to-end ecosystem for healthcare interoperability
The last stage in the healthcare interoperability journey is about addressing the alignment between business and technology objectives. A fundamental aspect of this stage is obtaining leadership buy-in, thereby empowering organizations to extend their interoperability initiatives beyond what is mandated by regulatory and industry requirements.
By focusing on enabling a comprehensive end-to-end solution for interoperability, organizations can leverage the potential of emerging standards, such FHIR, to facilitate seamless intra- and cross-organizational data exchange. Additionally, investing in the development of an Application Programming Interface (API)-driven ecosystem allows organizations to foster a highly connected, flexible, and scalable technology infrastructure that promotes innovative and improved patient-centric care services.
In the final stage of the healthcare interoperability journey, organizations are in the position to develop data driven applications (e.g predictive analytics, advanced reporting, population health management, etc.) using the latest technologies like AI to improve patient outcomes, enhance operational efficiency & increase profitability.
Get Started on your Healthcare Interoperability Journey with Blanc Labs
Interoperability can seem daunting, especially when trying to make sense of the entire journey. However, if approached methodically and incrementally with a well-thought-out strategy and roadmap, the end result can be a more secure, efficient, and user-centric system. Starting with developing the vision for an ecosystem that works for both you and your customers should give you confidence for making investments in interoperability technologies.
To understand how the interoperability journey will apply to your organization, simply speak to an expert from Blanc Labs today.
Financial Services | API Management | Digital Banking | Digital Transformation | IT Management
What is API Management?
March 15, 2023
Application Programming Interface (API) management has become an increasingly important aspect of modern business operations. With the advent of cloud computing and the need for digital transformation, enterprises are using APIs to enhance their existing applications, develop new applications, and drive innovation.
According to a study by Forbes, firms that used APIs saw 12.7% growth in their market capitalization over a period of four years. But using APIs is one thing and having an API strategy in place that can enable your business goals is another.
Proper management of APIs is imperative to support smooth business functioning. From startups to large enterprises, API management has become a critical component for businesses to remain competitive and meet the changing needs of their customers.
Whether you are a financial services provider looking to securely integrate third-party services, a retail giant seeking to improve your e-commerce platform, or a healthcare organization seeking to securely exchange medical data, API management can help you achieve your business objectives.
API Management Components
API management components are the building blocks that make up a comprehensive API management solution. These components work together to enable organizations to effectively manage their APIs and deliver value to their customers and partners. The primary components of API management include:
API Gateway
The API gateway is the component that sits at the front end of the API management architecture, acting as a traffic cop for incoming API requests. The API gateway is responsible for routing API requests to the appropriate backend services, applying security and access controls, and transforming data between different formats. The gateway also provides features such as caching, rate limiting, and request and response transformations.
Developer Portal
The developer portal is a platform that provides developers with the information and tools they need to consume and build applications using your APIs. A good developer portal includes detailed documentation, code samples, forums, and tools for testing and debugging. The developer portal is a key component of API management as it helps to foster a community of developers who can help you drive adoption and engagement with your APIs.
Reporting and Continuous Improvement
Reporting and continuous improvement are essential components of API management as they help organizations understand how their APIs are used, identify improvement areas, and make data-driven decisions about their API strategies. With the help of real-time analytics and usage reports, organizations can track key metrics such as API request volumes, response times, and error rates. This information can then be used to continuously improve the API management process and deliver a better experience to developers and end-users.
API Lifecycle Management
API lifecycle management is the process of managing the entire life cycle of an API, from design and development to retirement and deprecation. This includes tasks such as versioning, testing, and publishing APIs, as well as managing security and access controls. API lifecycle management helps to ensure that APIs are managed in a consistent and organized manner, enabling organizations to respond quickly to changing business requirements and deliver value to their customers and partners.
Benefits of an API Management Platform
API management platforms provide a number of benefits to organizations that are looking to leverage APIs to drive innovation and growth. Some of the key benefits include:
Improved Security
APIs provide businesses with various benefits such as accessing enterprise services from different devices, promoting innovation, and creating new revenue streams. However, using APIs can also pose risks to data security, which is why it is crucial to protect them with an API manager. API management platforms are essential to ensure the security of APIs as they monitor their usage and implement security protocols such as JWT, OpenID and OAuth. Additionally, API management platforms can provide extra security benefits by controlling access to applications.
Increased Agility
API management platforms allow organizations to quickly and easily expose their existing systems and services as APIs. This enables organizations to respond quickly to changing business requirements and create new opportunities for growth and innovation. With the ability to easily manage and scale APIs, organizations can quickly and easily adapt to changing business needs.
A good example of this is the Emirates NBD Bank. In an interview with McKinsey, senior bank executives explained how they were able to achieve effectiveness and efficiency by shifting to APIs. “We have enabled several strategic business initiatives as a result. One example is our digital onboarding, which is available on mobile phones for self-service and via tablet for assistance in our branches. “We have onboarded more than 100,000 customers with our new process, doing up to 85 percent with straight-through processing in less than ten minutes,” said Neeraj Makin, group head of international and group strategy. Today, the bank offers more than 800 microservices and have seen over a million interactions in the last two years.
Improved Developer Experience
API management platforms provide a centralized location for developers to access and use APIs. With features such as detailed documentation, code samples, and testing tools, API management platforms make it easy for developers to consume and build applications using your APIs. This helps to drive adoption and engagement with your APIs, which can lead to increased revenue and more opportunities for innovation.
Better Monitoring and Analytics
API management platforms provide real-time monitoring and analytics capabilities, allowing organizations to track the usage and performance of their APIs. This information can be used to identify areas for improvement, optimize performance, and make data-driven decisions about your API strategy. With a better understanding of how your APIs are being used, you can make informed decisions about how to optimize your API offerings and deliver a better experience to your customers and partners.
Monetization Opportunities
API management platforms provide organizations with the tools and capabilities to monetize their APIs. With features such as billing, usage tracking, and rate limiting, organizations can set pricing and usage policies for their APIs, creating new revenue streams and driving growth.
Top Use Cases for API Management
The global API management market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 34.5% and reach $41.5 billion by 2031. API management has a wide range of use cases across various industries and sectors. A few of the major use cases are:
Digital Transformation Initiatives
API management is an essential component of digital transformation initiatives as it allows organizations to expose their existing systems and services as APIs. This enables organizations to quickly and easily create new applications and services, and drive innovation in a fast-changing digital landscape. With the ability to manage and scale APIs, organizations can respond quickly to changing business requirements and drive growth.
Open Banking
Open banking is an emerging trend that is transforming the financial services industry. With open banking, financial institutions can securely share their customer data with third-party providers, enabling new financial products and services to be created. API management is a critical component of open banking as it provides a secure and controlled environment for exchanging financial data, helping to ensure that customer data is protected and that transactions are compliant with regulatory requirements.
Data security is a critical concern for organizations in a wide range of industries. With API management, organizations can secure their APIs and the sensitive data they carry with features such as authentication, authorization, and encryption. This helps to protect sensitive information and ensures that data is transmitted securely, reducing the risk of data breaches and protecting the reputation of your organization.
Compliance
Compliance is an important consideration for organizations in regulated industries such as healthcare and finance. With API management, organizations can ensure that their APIs are compliant with regulatory requirements, such as the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS). This helps organizations minimize their risk of non-compliance and reduces the risk of costly penalties.
Custom API Management Solutions from Blanc Labs
At Blanc Labs, we understand the unique needs and requirements of our clients, and we offer custom API management solutions that are tailored to meet your specific needs. Our API management solutions are designed to provide enterprise organizations with the tools and capabilities they need to drive their digital transformation initiatives, secure their data, and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements.
If you are interested in learning more about the benefits of API management and how Blanc Labs can help you achieve your goals, we encourage you to book a discovery call with our team. Our experienced consultants will work with you to understand your needs and provide you with a customized solution that is tailored to meet your specific requirements.
Financial Services | API Management | Digital Banking | IT Management
Finding the right API Management Platform
November 3, 2022
APIs are an integral part of today’s digital world. They are used for secure data exchange, integration, and content syndication. As APIs become more ubiquitous in enterprise businesses, it becomes necessary to manage them efficiently.
Banking and Payments ecosystems are converging with Open Banking and Finance. Whether regulatory or market driven, these digital interactions are happening already – and growing exponentially. Doing APIs and API Management right are central to the growing interdependence and interoperability between Fintechs, Banks and Consumers. Stakeholders are demanding secure access to financial data to drive better customer experiences. A key enabler to that end are the systems that surround APIs.
What is API Lifecycle Management?
API Lifecycle Management is the process of building, controlling, distributing, analyzing, and reusing APIs. It also can include capabilities around intelligent discovery; one pane of glass visible across multiple API gateways and API management systems; bringing to life the visionary end state of monetizing and marketing all these capabilities to external parties to operationalize the concept of “API as a product”. Thus, there are many API Management solutions in the market offering a variety of features. But at the very minimum, an API Manager should allow users to do the following:
Discover APIs
Before you can more effectively govern their lifecycle, you need a simple and configurable tool to find, filter and tag all your API assets into a centralized repository. Simplify complexity and/or get better visibility and facts to position your organization to “open itself up” to the new business realities and opportunities emerging.
Design, build, and Test APIs
The API Management tool should provide everyone, from developers to partners, the ability to create APIs under a unified catalog and test their performance.
Deploy APIs
API Management tools should also allow you to publish APIs on-premises, on the cloud or in a hybrid environment. Additionally, the API Manager may give you a choice between managing the API infrastructure in the tool itself or on your own.
Secure APIs
By providing a central point of control, most API Management tools will ensure that you have full visibility of all your APIs across environments so you can mitigate any vulnerabilities.
Manage APIs
API Management tools should give you a central plane of visibility into APIs, events, and microservices. Most API management tools will allow you to govern APIs across all environments (on-premise, hybrid, cloud) and also allow you to integrate with other infrastructures, including AWS, Azure, and Mulesoft. A good API management tool should also provide multiple predefined policy filters to accelerate policy configuration.
Analyze APIs
An API Manager should give you real time metrics in a unified catalog. By providing data on the business performance or operations across your APIs, you can make better decisions leading to improved business results.
Extend and Reuse APIs
By giving you a single, unified catalog, an API Manager can eliminate duplication and extend the life of APIs through reuse.
The need for API Management
API management centralizes control of your API program—including analytics, access control, monetization, and developer workflows. It provides dependability, flexibility (to adapt to shifting needs), quality, and speed. To achieve these goals, an API Manager should, at the minimum, offer rate limits, access control, and usage policies.
Essential features of an API Manager tool
1. API Gateways
A gateway is the single entry point for all clients and is the most critical aspect of API management. An API gateway handles all the data routing requests and protocol translations between third-party providers (TPP) and the client. Gateways are equally important when securing API connections by deploying authentication and enforcement protocols.
2. Developer Portal
The primary use of the developer portal is to provide a hub, specifically for developers, to access and share API documentation. It is an essential part of streamlining communications between teams. Typically, developer portals are built on content management systems (CMS), allowing developers to explore, read, and test APIs. Other features of a developer portal could include chat forums for the internal and external developer community and FAQs.
3. API Lifecycle Management
As the name suggests, API Lifecycle Management provides an end-to-end view of how to manage APIs. API Lifecycle Management is a means to create a secure ecosystem for building, deploying, testing and monetizing and marketing APIs.
4. Analytics engine
The analytics engine identifies usage patterns, analyzes historical data, and creates tests for API performance to detect integration issues and assist in troubleshooting. The information gathered by the analytics engine can be used by business owners and technology teams to optimize their API offerings and improve them over time.
5. API monetization and marketing
API management tools can provide a framework for pricing and packaging APIs for partners and developers. Monetizing APIs involves generating revenue and keeping the API operational for consumers. Through usage contracts, you can monetize the microservices behind APIs. An API management tool will offer templatized usage contracts based on predefined metrics, including the number of API calls. This empowers innovative external players to help drive your business in ways you have not dreamed up yet – and still do it securely.
How successful is your API management?
Now that we know the features of an ideal API management software, how do you evaluate its success for your API efforts? Here are a few ways to track your progress:
Speed
How rapidly can you launch your APIs to meet your business goals? Latency and throughput are ways to measure the speed of deployment. Other areas to measure speed would be onboarding and upgrading APIs.
Flexibility
Flexibility is the breadth of options available to developers when adopting APIs. The greater the flexibility, the higher the cost and effort to manage the API.
Dependability
How available your APIs are to developers. One way to measure dependability is downtime. Quota is another way to restrict how many API calls can be made by a developer within a certain timeframe. Enforcing quotas makes API management more predictable and protects the API from abuse.
Quality
Stable APIs with consistent performance reflect higher quality. It is a way to measure a developer’s satisfaction with the API.
Cost
The above four factors contribute to cost. If your API management software provides a better view of all your APIs, it will reduce duplication and costs. Reuse of APIs is another way that you can save costs.
How are you managing API complexity?
If you are a business leader concerned about how to meet market demand through the creation and deployment of APIs, or you would like to monetize and reuse your existing APIs and reduce costs, then you need structured API management.
In partnership with Axway, Blanc Labs offers a way to manage your APIs to bring maximum business value. Axway’s API Management Platform enables enterprises to manage and govern their APIs for developing and applying their digital services.
Financial Services | API Management | IT Management | Open Banking
Blanc Labs and Axway partner up to provide integrated open banking solutions for all
October 5, 2022
Axway (Euronext: AXW.PA), a leading provider of open banking built on the Amplify API management platform, is proud to announce its partnership with Blanc Labs, a trusted financial service and healthcare innovation partner.
While the largest banks are already well along their digital journey, many others are still tasked with competing in what can feel like an uneven playing field. Financial institutions must have a clear strategy for implementing, governing, monetizing, and marketing APIs to ensure a frictionless customer experience and better business results.
“We want to help all banks – anyone who has something to bring to the table – to strategize and compete in the open banking arena,” said Eyal Sivan, Head of Open Banking at Axway. “They will thrive as they embrace open APIs, build on trusted customer relationships, and meet their customers’ needs wherever they are.”
“At Blanc Labs, we help our clients achieve extraordinary results by accelerating their digital transformation journey,” says Blanc Labs CEO Hamid Akbari. “APIzation will enable secure data interoperability within the financial services ecosystem. Open banking and Banking-as-a-Service pose a disruption challenge as well as a massive growth opportunity for banks and fintechs.”
The specialized solutions offered by Blanc Labs together with Axway make API integrations more efficient and cost-effective thanks to universal API management. Benefits of the unified API platform include:
Increased productivity as developers easily find and repurpose APIs, eliminating duplication of efforts
Less technical complexity by unifying and simplifying API services across the organization
Stronger security thanks to a unified, vendor-agnostic view of all APIs
Faster legacy system upgrades through an API-first layer, which simplifies the addition of new services
More robust governance through centralized documentation for multiple developer teams
“Partnering with Axway, a pioneer in API management and the open banking space, is a natural fit for us. Out-of-the-box support for open banking and common data standards will significantly reduce the cost of building next-gen financial services and will accelerate time-to-market for our clients,” Akbari adds.
As banks gain confidence with Axway and Blanc Labs open banking solutions, they can move from optimizing processes and keeping up with industry standards to unlocking new business models, discovering richer customer data insights, and building highly personalized services to delight their clients.
Learn more about the Axway-Blanc Labs partnership and how they can help banks fully participate in the growing open banking ecosystem, here.
About Blanc Labs
Blanc Labs is a preferred partner for enterprises looking to digitize and build the next generation of technology products and services. To help companies rapidly deliver on their digital initiatives, Blanc Labs has developed expertise and bespoke solutions in a wide variety of applications in financial services, healthcare, enterprise productivity and customer experience. Headquartered in Toronto, Blanc Labs serves the Americas through operations in Toronto, New York, Bogota and Buenos Aires. For more information on how Blanc Labs is building a better future, visit www.blanclabs.com.
About Axway
Axway enables enterprises to securely open everything by integrating and moving data across a complex world of new and old technologies. Axway’s API-driven B2B integration and MFT software, refined over 20 years, complements Axway Amplify, an open API management platform that makes APIs easier to discover and reuse across multiple teams, vendors, and cloud environments. Axway has helped over 11,000 businesses unlock the full value of their existing digital ecosystems to create brilliant experiences, innovate new services, and reach new markets. Learn more at axway.com.
Open Banking API Challenges: 4 Areas That Need Intervention
Financial Services | API Management | IT Management | Open Banking
Open Banking API Challenges: 4 Areas That Need Intervention
June 29, 2022
By Steven Chung and Bob Paajanen
As financial institutions find their way into the digital world, they face competition from several non-bank forces, including FinTechs and Big Tech companies like Apple, Google, and Amazon. FinTechs and Big Tech have begun rewriting the rules for the finance industry creating new ways of banking and new revenue streams. By offering speed, innovation, and unbundled financial services, digital non-banking entities are luring away customers from banks and credit unions. Open banking promises financial institutions an entry into the changing banking ecosystem by tapping into third-party application programming interfaces (APIs). But without the right strategy, banks may find themselves saddled with high costs, low time to value, vulnerable data systems, and no ROI to show.
API Challenges
As API adoption grows, so does the concern around how these APIs will be built or bought; how they will be managed; and the security and privacy risks that they present.
API Standardization and Documentation
The biggest concern around API adoption is standardization with more than 52% of organizations finding it a challenge. Unfortunately, there is no universal identity management framework which means that companies must rely on their developers to build their own management systems. Without proper documentation or style guides, different teams of developers within the organization may come up with varying standards for how the APIs are built and consumed, leading to issues with integration and management. The ‘State of Software Quality: API 2021’ study by SmartBear found that 54% of respondents pegged “accurate and detailed documentation” as the second most important characteristic they needed in an API as an API consumer, ease of use being the topmost. Yet, close to 40% of the respondents did not use API management software or were using an in-house API management tool.
API Security
As banks use more APIs to enable digital businesses and provide web and mobile experiences to customers, the chances of security breaches also go up. There have been several incidents of API attacks and data leaks this year alone. API security is made worse by the fact that many organizations lack an inventory of the APIs they create or use from third parties. Research firm Gartner found that the common theme among many of the API breaches was that “the breached organization didn’t know about their unsecured API until it was too late.” Sadly, there is no tool that will automatically discover vulnerabilities in the APIs. Implementing API threat protection and access control will require endpoint security (processes, infrastructure, and protocols). Without an API management platform in place, this will present further challenges.
“By 2022, API abuses will move from an infrequent to the most-frequent attack vector, resulting in data breaches for enterprise web applications.”
Gartner (2021)
API Governance standards and privacy regulations
Government-dictated compliance frameworks around APIs are still some time away for Canadian financial institutions. This means that developers at banks and credit unions must rely on varying standards, including security standards, when it comes to how API integrations will work and be used. Without governance standards, financial institutions run the risk of exposing themselves to fraudulent third parties and exposing customer information in ways that could be used against their interests.
API Reliability & Performance
To support new functionalities and user experiences, developers in financial institutions are relying more and more on third-party APIs, APIs from business partners, and from other business units within the enterprise. Many of these APIs are licensed from providers that also look after their daily operations. Due to the composite nature of these applications, an outage with one third-party API can impact any application that is using that API. As of April 2022, there were close to 7.8 million failed API calls in the UK according to Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE). The financial entities with the most failed calls are the big banks including Barclays, Lloyds, and HSBC. Frequent API errors create a negative impact on customer experience and may lead to discontinued product use.
Is your bank ready to adopt open banking?
API integrations are a necessity as we move towards an open banking system. Financial institutions must have a clear strategy on how they want to implement, govern, monetize, and market APIs to ensure a frictionless customer experience and better business results.
Blanc Labs has partnered with Axway to provide specialized solutions that make API integrations and management more efficient and cost-effective. Benefits of our unified API platform include:
Increased productivity, as developers are easily able to find and repurpose APIs instead of duplicating efforts or wasting time searching for them.
Less technical complexity by unifying and simplifying API services across the organization
Better security through a unified view of all APIs
Faster upgrades of legacy systems through an API-first layer allowing you to add new services more easily
More robust governance through centralized documentation that multiple teams of developers can reference
Financial Services | API Management | IT Management | Open Banking
Are your APIs causing more pain points instead of solving them?
June 22, 2022
Now, more than ever, banks are looking at ways to modernize their core technology to meet customer demands for speed, personalization, and seamless digital experiences. For the banks, a large part of that involves securely exposing customer data to third-party systems and consuming data from them. A simple example of this is using your bank credit card to pay with an app such as Google Pay or Apple Pay. For this data exchange to take place, banks build their own application programming interfaces (APIs) or use third-party APIs to interact with other systems. From a digital transformation viewpoint, APIs are indispensable in making banking services more open.
A study on APIs in banking by McKinsey found that nearly 70% of the surveyed banks planned to double the number of internal and third-party APIs and triple the use of public APIs. However, not all API integrations are successful. Close to 40% of the banks mentioned above did not have an API strategy or were still evaluating APIs. Mismanagement of APIs only increases operational issues, decreases productivity, pulls up costs, and delivers incremental results at best. Here we explore five API integration challenges and how to overcome them.
API Integration Challenges
Put simply, APIs are supposed to make it easy for disparate systems to work together. But poor integration can have the opposite effect, leading to silos, duplication of efforts, and rising costs. Some of the API integration challenges include:
Technological Complexity
High Costs
Security Risks
Time Consumption
Varying systems
Technological Complexity
API integration is not an easy process. In fact, of all the digital transformation initiatives, API integration may be the most daunting. The reason for this is that integrating APIs requires an overhaul of the bank’s core systems. Understandably, many banks and credit unions are reluctant to change their core systems in one go as seen in the chart below. Yet, 75% of banks state that the number one reason for focusing their corporate banking strategy on APIs is “improving internal corporate banking processes, workflows and product management.”
To carefully integrate APIs while upgrading core systems at a pace that is suited to the bank requires a team of experts including highly skilled developers that come with a heavy price tag.
High Costs
Hiring a team of experts to execute APIs is only one part of the cost of integrating APIs. The question for many financial institutions is one of build or buy as this requires significant financial resources, a dependable developer ecosystem, as well as a strategy to monetize these APIs so current costs may be justified. Building a single API can cost upwards of $10,000 (as of 2020) depending on the complexity of the integration and the times it takes developers to build it. Buying APIs may come at a lower cost. Either way, there is no getting around the expense of building APIs and integrating them with core systems.
Security Risks
In Canada, the number of stolen records went up by 4,379% between 2015 and 2020. A data breach in Canada costs approximately $6.35M CAD. The use of APIs is reliant on web-based applications, which means that they are more open to threats from hackers and ransomware. Add to this the fact that a data breach can severely damage the reputation of an organization. API integration projects require hiring a team of security experts as well as updated security protocols.
Time Consumption
Setting up an API connection and integration module can take anywhere from a few weeks to months. This is the time when the development team will learn the logic and architecture of your platform and work to reduce bugs, among other things. Financial institutions that choose the wrong API solution may find that they are losing out to the competition by coming in last.
Varying systems
Within APIs and API systems, there are all kinds of architectures and software. Every system has its own logic and therefore each integration has its unique challenges. With every new system that developers work with, they need time and expertise to integrate APIs with those systems. Therefore, with multiple integrations, the process does not get faster and only becomes more complex
How to overcome API integration challenges
API integrations are a necessity as we move towards an open banking system. Financial institutions must have a clear strategy on how they want to implement, govern, monetize and market APIs to avoid high costs, duplications, and incremental gains.
Blanc Labs has partnered with Axway to provide specialized solutions that make API integrations more efficient and cost effective. Benefits of our unified API platform include:
Increased productivity, as developers are easily able to find and repurpose APIs instead of duplicating efforts or wasting time searching for them.
Less technical complexity by unifying and simplifying API services across the organization
Better security through a unified view of all APIs
Faster upgrades of legacy systems through an API-first layer allowing you to add new services more easily
More robust governance through centralized documentation that multiple teams of developers can reference
